Uli Seit for The New York Times. Photo of journalist Marie Colvin in living room of her mother, Rosemarie Colvin

Marie Colvin (1957-2012), RIP

I’ve been very touched by the death of Marie Colvin, a journalist who died for her belief that she must keep reporting the situation in Homs “so that no one would have an excuse to say, ‘I did not know’.” A woman who believed that journalism could curtail the excesses of brutal regimes, and make the world pay attention.

I’ve been following Colvin’s writings since the mid-80s, when she started writing about Middle Eastern affairs. It’s a part of the world that I’ve always been interested in, and I spent time in 1978 travelling in Syria, where I visited Homs.

Back then, Syria was stable – it was Lebanon that was the war zone. Syria was a dictatorship, but people were relatively open in talking about the politics of the country, and they seemed happy enough. They were proud of their culture and their country, particularly when you compared President Assad (the father) with Saddam Hussein next door in Iraq. Certainly whatever oppression people might have been experiencing was not obvious.

How times change.

What struck me about Marie Colvin’s life and death was that she was totally committed to what she did, she had a strong sense of purpose, which drove her forward, and she never let being a woman stand in her way. Even after losing an eye, and ending up in a clinic with PTSD, she still continued her work.

Her death is sad because a brave woman who lived to tell the world about atrocities and oppression died while at the height of her powers. At this point, we can’t yet tell what difference (if any) her death will make to the Syrian situation. But she lived a life to the full, following her dream career, dedicating herself to instigating change where it mattered.

Here’s what her friend and fellow journalist, Henry Porter said about her, in Vanity Fair.

“What was striking about that period was her complete absence of self-pity. I never heard Marie complain about the hardships she endured or the effects of witnessing so much pain. When she was suffering from PTSD, she used to be let out of the clinic and would come round to dinner with her friend Jane Wellesley. My teenage daughters were open-mouthed at the sight of this astonishing woman with an eye patch, listening to her describe what she had done in the previous 20 years. The point, she emphasized with a tipsy flourish of cigarette and wine glass, was that women could do anything they chose.”

I know I don’t have the inclination or the courage to do what Marie Colvin did. But her death has led me to question what I can do to make a difference, to be a woman of courage, knowing that I can do anything I choose.

Talent Management

Over the last few years ‘Talent Management‘ has become a buzzword on the lips of HR professionals in large organizations – but how is it relevant to the individual? And what happens if your organization doesn’t have a talent management program (some times known as a ‘Fast-Stream’), or if you can’t get into it? How can you manage your own talent to ensure your career success?

Let’s start with the what and the why.

What Is A Talent Management Program?

In an article on how it feels to be talent-managed, the UK’s CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) describes talent management as follows:
‘Talent management is the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention and deployment of those individuals who are of particular value to an organization, either in view of their ‘high potential’ for the future or because they are fulfilling business/operation-critical roles.’

Phew!

Generally a talent management program is something that larger organizations create to develop their high performers, or people who they have identified as having ‘high potential’. They are designed to fast-track career progression, and they use a mixture of training courses, coaching programs, action learning sets or mastermind groups, mentoring programs, job shadowing, secondments and other ‘learning interventions’ (to use the HR jargon) to move the individual swiftly forward in the organization.

If the organization is being clever, it ties its talent management program into long term succession-planning, so it can groom the senior managers and directors of the future. These days, however, people are mobile, and may not stick around long enough to make it to Director level, so talent management programs offer a mutually beneficial way of encouraging them to stay.

Why Is Talent Management Relevant To You?

Of course, talent management is relevant to the organizations that offer it. They wouldn’t bother unless they could make a clear business case for the benefits, because talent management programs don’t come cheap. Consequently, most of the literature on Talent Management looks at it from the employers’ point of view.

However, it’s also important from an individual’s point of view. Firstly, follow-up interviews of people in talent management programs have shown that the activities they find most valuable are personal development activities, like coaching and mentoring, rather than formal study. So if you are looking to develop your personal talent without the benefit of a formal talent management program, those are probably the activities that are going to give you most leverage, notwithstanding your preferred learning style.

Secondly, if you’re not in a Talent Management program – either because your organization doesn’t have one, or because you can’t get into the program your employers run – how are you going to complete with people who are benefiting from the membership of a Talent Management program? I have worked with clients who applied unsuccessfully to join their employers’ program. Some of them felt excluded, because such programs often include some form of network, forum or mastermind group. Some felt that they somehow fell short, or had no future with their employer, because their employer didn’t consider them ‘good enough’ to join the program. And others figured out ways of developing themselves anyway.

How Can You Create Your Own Talent Management Program

Without the support of your employer, there are some options that are more difficult to put in place, but there is still plenty that you could do on your own.

The first step is to identify your own career aspirations. Assuming you want a career in the industry you are in, then how high do you want to rise? When I work with a Talent Management group, almost the first question I ask is, ‘how much do you want promotion, and how far do you want to be promoted?’ I have worked with many clients who realized they wanted to rise to the top. Equally I have worked with others who have realized, through coaching, that they weren’t interested in taking on more responsibility, or that their values where not in total alignment with those of the organization, or that self-employment was a better option for them.

Typically, people will focus on senior managers and directors in their own organization to see how they need to develop. This is fine as a tactic, but it’s not very strategic. Industries and organizations change over time. The skills, knowledge and experience that are essential now may be redundant in five or ten years time. For example, in the early ’90s, companies were still focusing on IQ, or intellectual, mental intelligence, based on logical reasoning and similar skills. By the late ’90s, Emotional Intelligence had come into play. While intellect was still important, the world had woken up to the fact that the best leaders can relate to other people, not just ideas.

So what new skills and attitudes will you need to develop to stay ahead of the game?

It’s also important to consider how the wider business environment might change, both in your industry and beyond. The UK telecoms company, BT, used to have a team of people whose job was to read science fiction to help them identify the sorts of technology they needed to develop in the future. They may still have such a team. While I’m not suggesting you work you way through Amazon’s Sci-Fi and games section, how can you become a futurologist in your sphere?

How Do You Learn Best?

We all learn in different ways. Some people are more hands on, and learn by doing. A business-mentor friend of mine told me she hates instructional videos, because they move too slowly for her, but she loves learning through reading. She loves audio-learning, which I hate because there’s nothing to look at, and I am easily distracted.

Research with children has shown they learn better when they work in pairs or small groups, rather than on their own. Hence the success of Action Learning Sets and Mastermind Groups for adults.

So how do you learn best, and how much time and money are you willing to invest in your learning? Or, to put it another way, what is your learning worth to you?

What Other Ways Can You Develop Your Talent?

One of the tricks to developing your own personal Talent Management program is to find more unusual learning opportunities. One client I coached realized that she needed to develop her financial knowledge and budgeting skills in order to progress in her organization. Unfortunately, she could only get a job or secondment in the finance department if she had the financial skills, so she found herself in a chicken and egg situation. We looked at what she could bring from her life outside work. As it happened, she was heavily involved with her local church, and the Treasurer was always complaining that he was over-burdened with mundane financial activities.

She spotted the opportunity, and offered to take on some of the data-juggling activities in return for the chance to work alongside him on the more strategic aspects of his role.

Take Control With Your Own Talent Management Strategy

If you don’t take control, then either you will drift along, or someone else will take control. The business guru, Rich Schefren, talks about the difference between business opportunity seekers and strategic entrepreneurs. Business opportunity seekers are never as successful as they would like to be, while strategic entrepreneurs are far more likely to exceed their own expectations.

The same analogy applies when planning for your career success. You can be an opportunity seeker, drifting along, catching opportunities as they come up. Alternatively, you can take a strategic view, identifying your talents and aspirations and the career path which will honor both, planning out the steps along that path, and selecting only the opportunities that take you in the direction of your choice.

Creating your own talent management strategy is the road to career success.

But something positive seems to have come out of his death, too. It is reported that several top footballers have sought help for their depression in the days following his death.  And it has put the question of mental health back on the agenda.

One of the questions people ask is, how can highly paid, successful sports stars, who have it all, become so miserable. I think one of the answers lies in the relationship between depression and stress.

Top competitors can be as stressed in their career as anyone. They put themselves through demanding training regimes, and many of them sacrifice their family life to the requirements of the sport as the pursue their career success. The satisfaction you can achieve when you are that focused on one thing and one thing only can be enormous. But that level of success is not always enough, and many sports people find it difficult to cope with the consequences of failure, or a dwindling career.

I have a number of friends who are musicians. Some of them have enjoyed fame and fortune in the past, then lost it. Some handle it well, while others turn to drink or drugs and become depressed because they feel as if their identity is lost, and they can’t find alternatives that fill their time or their life in the way performing to thousand of people did.

So what’s this got to do with those of us who are running the 9 to 5, then?

A lot.

Stress and career success

Stress is a complex business. We all need some level of stress to function, otherwise we wouldn’t accomplish anything, but there are good levels of stress, which keep us motivated and interested, and bad levels of stress where we go into overwhelm – the famous flight or fight response. Fight or flight is a survival mechanism: faced by a sabre toothed tiger you can fight it or run away. But the modern equivalents of sabre toothed tigers often seem inescapable, whether it is the threat of eviction because you can’t pay the rent, or the threat from the gang on the corner, or the hideously noisy neighbours, or your own health, or that of a family member. These are all things that can lead us towards depression,

And work can be a huge source of stress, as can lack of it. For many of us, when we have a job, we have an identity, a role, a structure to our lives. If we are really lucky we have work friends and a sense of doing something worthwhile. It gives us money too. One of the big challenges of redundancy or losing your job is the loss of all that. People’s confidence often takes a tumble, they don’t feel they are contributing and their lives can become lacking in structure. It’s strange, because most of us want more time for ourselves when we are working, but when we get that time we haven’t the desire to use it productively. It’s not just the economy that suffers when people lose their jobs. Their mental and physical health may deteriorate too.

And when people are made redundant and becoming depressed, that can have a huge impact on their families. Other family members may have to work extra hours to pick up the financial stress, kids get used to seeing Mum or Dad hanging around, doing very little, looking miserable, even diminishing before their eyes. Some people become angry, and either turn the anger in on themselves, or out against their family or society.

Meanwhile, those who have kept their jobs are working harder. We’ve all heard tales of people working 60 hours weeks and having no time for friends or family, of incompetent managers who don’t know how to allocate work fairly, of work-place bullying, or of an culture that manages to erode individual self-confidence without even realising it. Even people who are extremely successful in an office-based job can suffer profound stress and/or depression.

New attitudes to depression

At least there is a growing willingness to talk about depression. For example, I heard a radio programme recently where comedienne Ruby Wax was talking about a new venture she is involved in, along with the mental health charity, Sane. It’s called black dog tribe: a space where people who have been or are depressed can come together. Ruby has been working to publicise the problem for a number of years. She was involved in the BBC’s headroom project, which has just ended. Although the site says it ran for 21/2 years, I was involved in it some years before that. At one time she was something of a voice crying in the wilderness. I hope she is becoming more mainstream.

As someone who has managed to work through depression, triggered in part by workplace stress (bullying), I know the importance of talking to others and getting help. It maybe that coaching can help you. That’s particularly true if the problem is stress, rather than depression. But if you are suffering from depression, if you find yourself wondering what the point of it all is, or you’re drinking/doing drugs more than before, or you can’t stop crying, or you can’t get out of bed in the morning, or you’ve lost all hope, then get help. Black Dog Tribe launches in the New Year. They currently have a Black Dog test site up, and plan to go fully live in January.  is   Mental health charities like Sane, or Mind, or the Mental Health Foundation can give you information and may be able to help you find support and treatment. There is no shame in depression. It is a mental health problem, and it is as real as a broken leg.

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